Dear Illusion: Collected Stories Page 7

  The major hardly heard the last part of this. In the weeks since the war ended, even more since the larger part of the unit had gone to Potsdam, he had been possessed and tormented by dreams of triumph, renown or at least advancement. One of these, which he never visualized with full conscious attention, was about a local Nazi uprising crushed by him in a single prompt and ruthless blow. Another, disguised as an unuttered joke, involved the removal with ignominy of the CO as a chief executive of communications at Potsdam and the immediate substitution of himself: ‘Where’s Raleigh? Get hold of Raleigh. There’s only one man for this job and that’s Dick Raleigh.’

  Dreams three and four engaged him more continuously, if less profoundly. Three he had taken what steps he could to bring to life. In the last month he had written three demi-official memoranda to the Signals general at Army Group headquarters. Their theme was that, if the war against Japan lasted long enough, there would probably be a role in it for a new full-dress Headquarters Signals unit, and that the body of troops at present under his command, admittedly miscellaneous but in a high state of training, could with advantage be used as the basis of such a unit. He himself, he had pleaded, could ask for nothing better than to stay on in uniform past the date of his expected release, indeed indefinitely, if he could be allowed to serve as its leader.

  The first memorandum had been acknowledged with the utmost formality, the others not at all. As each day brought no word from Army Group HQ, and as news of Japanese reverses mounted, the major fell back increasingly on his fourth dream. This had been put into his head by the compulsions of military geography. The medium-sized village in which he and his men were living had turned out to lie within administrative reach of a smallish but important railhead – the one at Hildesfeld. The Movement Control people there were faced with the task of propelling personnel westward about three times faster than their resources allowed. The accumulating residue had to be put somewhere. The major’s village and its environs were an obvious lodgment for it. The major had taken it upon himself to provide communications between the railhead and the tankless tank troops, the gunless artillery sections, the reconnaissance detachments with nothing in Europe left to reconnoitre – all those whom destiny or administrative whim had transmitted in this general direction.

  If this situation continued, authority would have to recognize it. A different type of man from the major might have noticed an analogy with the experiences of an ex-colonial territory on the threshold of statehood. As things were he simply saw himself as an Area Commandant with a lieutenant-colonelcy to match. Only one officer of this rank was known to be living hereabouts, a youthful Engineer on twenty-four-hour warning of departure who was rumoured to divide his time between drinking schnapps in a farmhouse bedroom and driving round the countryside looking for more, this at a speed which suggested that death might remove him before officialdom could. Of the five or six local majors, inquiry showed that Raleigh was senior to three and had been around the place longer than any. ‘Lieut-Col. R. W. Raleigh, R Sigs’ sounded authentic. So did ‘Winkworth (West) Conservative Association – Chairman: Colonel Richard W. Raleigh’.

  ‘All right, Wilf,’ the major said. ‘I’ll take care of it. Was there anything else?’

  ‘About the Shop again, sir. I take it it would be all right to get a few things for one or two of the blokes while I’m there?’

  The major frowned. It was his major’s frown, his responsibility invoking frown, his slackness-detecting frown, his extra-duty-donating frown. He kept it on full for a while before he said: ‘I’m not sure that’s a very good idea.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t see why not. Things are pretty relaxed these days. We’re not at war any more, after all. I can’t see it doing anybody much harm.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go all the way with you there, old boy. While the blokes have got so much time on their hands it’s particularly important to maintain discipline. It doesn’t help at all, throwing shoes and ties and what-not around indiscriminately. This is an Officers’ Shop we’re talking about, not a natty gents’ tailoring establishment. Why do you think Officers and men are required to dress differently? To emphasize the difference in their status, of course. That’s quite fundamental.’

  ‘I know, Major’ – Cleaver was being uncharacteristically persistent – ‘but it’s going on all over the place, you see. Only yesterday I saw a couple of the lads on the switchboard wearing those jeep coats, the sort with the—’

  ‘They’re in Archer’s lot; I’ve already had a word with him about it. There’s a great deal too much of this all-chums-together spirit around these days and I don’t like it. It isn’t . . . healthy. Anyway, who were you thinking of getting stuff for?’

  ‘Well, evidently Doll could do with a couple of shirts, and the Quartermaster-Sergeant was talking about a few pairs of shoes – he didn’t say who he wanted them for – and then my batman was asking—’

  The major’s frown, which had almost cleared, came back again, but with a difference that indicated that thought of some description was going on behind it. ‘That’s rather different. Doll knows this sort of thing is a privilege and he’s not the kind of fellow to abuse it. The QMS has done a first-class job for everybody at a very difficult time,’ – and, the major might have added, a five-star cordon bleu crossed-knife-and-fork-in-the-Michelin-guide-type job for himself out of the petrol-hunger of a chain of civilians that stretched back as far as Arromanches on the Norman coast – ‘and if he needs a pair of shoes or two I don’t think it’s really up to us to question it. As regards your batman – well, I regard that as a personal matter between the two of you. Batmen have always had these little perks – it’s a tradition. Yes, that’s all right, Wilf.’

  ‘Thanks, Major.’

  ‘You did quite right to tell me, though,’ Raleigh said emphatically, leaving the other in no doubt about its being quite wrong not to tell him in the future, and picked up a sheaf of vehicle returns. He knew full well what was on them, for the transport situation, like much else, had remained static for weeks, but the small effort involved in putting common knowledge into due form helped to keep the sections on their toes, or at any rate off their backsides.

  Cleaver cranked his telephone and after a moment said: ‘Parachute Section, please . . . What? When was this? I see. Is anyone working on it? Well, let me know the moment it’s back, will you? – I say, Major.’

  Raleigh looked up as if he had been deep in the vehicle returns for a day or so. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The line to the parachute people’s out. Looks as if I’ll have to go and tell Winch myself.’

  ‘Winch?’

  ‘About the pay. We decided—’

  ‘Yes, yes. Get Doll to send someone over. It’s only a few hundred yards.’

  While Cleaver again cranked his phone and spoke, the major turned over his in-tray a second time, then got going on his own phone. ‘Give me the Signalmaster . . . Signalmaster? Signals Command Group here, Major Raleigh. Who is that?’

  ‘Archer, sir.’

  ‘Frank, what’s happened to the morning summary of communications? It’s supposed to be on my desk at nine o’clock.’

  Seated at his trestle table in the commodious and airy barn that housed the Signal Office, Archer blushed. ‘I sent it across, sir. Nearly two hours ago.’

  This inadvertent reminder of how long after nine o’clock the major had presumptively begun his morning’s work did not go down well. ‘I don’t care how long ago you think you sent it across, Frank, it isn’t here.’

  ‘There’s only one thing on it, sir – the line to Para-Sec is down; otherwise—’

  ‘I know that. That’s not the point. You’d better have a look round there and then come over and talk to me about it. I want a word with you anyway.’

  Sighing, Archer got to his feet and stretched. Inactivity reigned about him. A single teleprinter clattered away in one corner. A bespectacled corporal read a paperback novel in front of the wood-and-canvas rack in which tra
nsmitted messages were filed. The rack had been cleared at midnight and now carried half a dozen exiguous batches of flimsy. The two counter-clerks were playing chess while the orderly, an aged and delinquent Highland infantryman, watched them in wonder. The locations clerk was busy with his eraser, removing what must have been one of the last official traces of yet another defunct unit.

  Archer raised his voice. ‘Hargreaves!’

  Peering anxiously, laboriously pinching out a cigarette, Hargreaves hurried in from the open air. His battledress blouse, instead of lying open at the top to reveal a collar and tie, was buttoned up and hooked at the throat; he must have been one of the last men in the British Army to avail himself of the recent sartorial concession. No doubt the older style made fewer demands on his time and energy. ‘Yes, Mr Archer?’ he said.

  ‘You took the summary of communications across to Command Group, didn’t you?’

  ‘The what, Mr Archer?’

  ‘That thing I gave you to take over to the major’s Office, you took it, didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes. Captain Cleaver was there and I gave it to him.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Oh absolutely, Mr Archer.’

  ‘You’d swear to that?’ Archer smiled conspiratorially. ‘They’re trying to make out over there that I never sent it. You’d stand by me if it came to a court-martial, wouldn’t you?’

  Hargreaves looked worried. ‘I don’t quite understand, Mr Archer, but if there’s any trouble you can count on me to—’

  ‘Never mind, Hargreaves, I was only pulling your leg . . . Good show you put up last night at the parliament, by the way – I was meaning to tell you.’

  ‘Oh, thank you very much, Mr Archer, how kind of you . . . You don’t think perhaps it was a bit . . . extreme? You know, at the end.’

  ‘Not a bit, you were quite justified. These people need to be talked to straight once in a while. You keep at it. Oh, and I thought that bit about Auden came in very well. I didn’t know you were a fan of his.’

  ‘I’ve just read a few of his things, sir.’

  ‘I see.’ Archer became conscious that he had been smiling rather a lot. ‘Right, that’s all, Hargreaves, thank you.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  On Archer’s table lay a letter he had been writing to a friend of his in Oxford, one who, like most of his contemporaries, was medically unfit for military service – a doubly fortunate shortcoming in the present case, for one of this friend’s several neuroses forbade him to be ordered about. The letter was full of undetailed assertions of hatred and misery, unsolicited news about what Archer’s two girl-friends in England had been writing to him, and inquiries about issues of jazz records. He put on top of it the Signalmaster’s Diary – its sole entry for the morning read 0840 On duty F. N. Archer Lt – and told Sergeant Parnell, the superintendent, where he was going. Then he donned his ridiculous khaki beret and left.

  Outside, the sunlight was intense. Hargreaves was standing in the shade, leaning against the corner timber of the barn and talking to a switchboard-operator called Hammond, who among other things was Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Home Office. He gave Archer an inquisitive brown-eyed glance.

  Archer went down the yard, at one side of which a dispatch-rider was dozing on a heap of straw, and crossed the cobbled street to the school building. He was thinking that the oddest thing about the major, or about himself, was that Raleigh’s behaviour was getting funnier all the time without arousing any laughter in him, Archer. Take Raleigh’s unconcealed delight whenever a new formation moved into the area and thus gave him another place to have a line run to and a telephone installed at, an amenity much resented by its beneficiaries, who would usually have spent most of the war too near a telephone and asked for nothing better than to remain incommunicable. The major had almost got drunk – he never did quite – on the strength of having foisted a special dispatch run and a wireless link upon a Displaced Persons Area Authority on the verge of closure. He seemed very near believing that stuff like this represented a serious and adequate role for a group that had provided half the communications of an Army Corps Group headquarters at war; he no longer excused the farce of having a Signal Office here at all by saying (untruly) that it kept the lads busy.

  The same shift of attitude had taken place over his road. This boulevard through the camp area, too short to matter except in terms of the energy its construction absorbed and totally unnecessary anyway because of the dry summer, was about to be extended to other parts of the major’s tribal domain. Archer foresaw himself doing further stints of uninformed supervision, watching the hard-core and rubble go down, scouring the village for more wheelbarrows, driving out to the Engineers detachment to borrow yet more. Hitler had been funny too, but you had had to live in Valparaiso or somewhere to be able to laugh at him with conviction.

  A flight of green-painted wooden steps led up the side of the school. Sergeant Doll was sitting on them, evidently improving his tan. With the affability of a pub landlord at the entry of a notable big spender, he called from a distance: ‘Good-morning to you, Mr Archer, and how are you this fine morning, sir?’

  ‘Oh, fed up,’ Archer said unguardedly.

  ‘Well, I’m not, sir, I don’t mind telling you.’ Doll made no move to get up and let Archer pass. ‘I’ve got plenty to eat and a decent bed and no work and nothing to spend my pay on and nobody to bother me. I’m winning, sir.’

  ‘Yes, you are, aren’t you?’ Archer, whose head was on a lower level than Doll’s, noticed that the other seemed to have no hairs whatsoever in his nose. This had the effect of making his moustache appear, if not actually false, at any rate an isolated phenomenon.

  ‘That was a nice little spot of bother at the old House of Commons last night, sir, wasn’t it? Of course that fellow Hargreaves, he’s unbalanced, isn’t he? A lot of these Reds are, you know. There must be something in that particular philosophy that sort of attracts such people. He must be a perfect little darling to have in the section, Master Hargreaves. I don’t know how you put up with him, sir, honestly I don’t. I’d have got rid of him many moons ago.’

  ‘Oh, he’s not as bad as all that. He is an educated man, after all.’

  ‘That makes it twenty times worse, sir, in my view. The corruption of the best is worst, I remember reading that somewhere. You’d be the one who’d know where it comes from, I expect, sir, wouldn’t you?’

  Archer looked up sharply, but Doll’s eye was as bland as ever. ‘It’s Latin,’ Archer said. ‘I think.’

  ‘No doubt, sir. It’s really a pity Hargreaves made an exhibition of himself like that. Damaged his own case, I thought. Don’t you agree, sir?’

  There was a pause while Archer recalled what was perhaps his sole intelligently self-interested action since joining the Company: putting a half-bottle of whisky on Doll’s desk last Christmas Eve. Ever since then the major, who tended to make a confidant of Doll, had found that his little surprises for Archer, in the shape of unheralded inspections of the Signal Office and the like, had an odd way of turning out not to be surprises after all. Rather late in the day, Archer was discovering a related principle, that the Army afforded unique scope for vindictiveness and that disagreement on apparently neutral matters often provoked such a reaction. He knew now that the Adjutant of the unit, who had of course gone to Potsdam with the others, had been that sort of person, selecting junior officers for troublesome duties less by caprice than by remembering who had most recently contested his opinion in the Mess, even if the subject had been literature or the weather. Sometimes a tendency to confuse names (surprising in so incessant an advocate of attention to detail) gave his selections an involuntary impartiality. After thinking about it for two years, Archer was nearly sure that a historic mission to collect a new type of line-transmission apparatus, entailing a journey three-quarters of the way across England and back in January and two successive nights in an unheated railway carriage, had fallen to his share because a secon
d-lieutenant called Belcher, whom Archer hoped he did not in the least resemble, had a day or two earlier contradicted the Adjutant about Alice in Wonderland. But as the Adjutant got to know his subalterns better, such miscarriages of injustice had become rarer, not that this change had been to Archer’s advantage.

  Although Archer had never made any progress in finding out what Doll was like, he judged it unwise to risk diminishing the effect of that half-bottle by saying what he really felt about Hargreaves’s outburst and thence, inevitably, what he felt about Doll’s politics. The major’s régime was doubtless drawing to a close, but its last days might well be marked by a fury of moral violence. Archer could not afford to irritate a friend at court, or anywhere else for that matter. He said decisively: ‘Yes, he did go too far, much too far. I think he feels a bit cheap about it today. You weren’t annoyed, I hope?’

  ‘Oh no, sir, my back is broad. As I say, all he did was help my side. That Government’ll fall soon, you mark my words. You were wanting to see the major, sir, were you?’

  ‘Yes, I thought I might look in.’

  ‘He’s got Captain Cleaver with him at the moment . . . Ah, here is the captain now.’

  Doll got up as Cleaver emerged from the doorway and descended the steps. Archer grinned at him; Cleaver was the one officer in the detachment whom he regarded with nothing but contempt – groomed for stardom by the Adjutant and finally rejected on the grounds of technical incompetence: a tremendous achievement. He had got his captaincy, though. ‘Hallo, Wilf,’ Archer said.

  ‘Oh, hallo,’ Cleaver said, getting into his tone surprise at being so familiarly addressed. He carried gloves and a short cane and looked more than ever like a British officer as pictured in a German army manual. ‘The major’s waiting for you.’